The Flag of Venezuela

I have just finished reading V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World. No one can describe the sometimes barely visible gradations that make up racism and colonialism. At one point, his character Francisco Miranda—a fictional precursor to Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and the other liberators of South America from Spanish rule—discusses the difficulties inherent in unifying the newly freed peoples of Venezuela:

“In all your years of writing about Venezuela and South America, you simplified it, General. You talked about Incas and white people. You talked about people worthy of Plato’s republic. You always left out two of the colours. You left out the black and you left out the mulatto. Was that because you were far away?”

“No. I did it because it was easier for me intellectually. Most of my ideas about liberty came to me from conversation and reading when I was abroad. So the country I created in my mind became more and more like the countries I read about. There were no Negroes in Tom Paine or Rousseau. And when I tried to be like them I found it hard to fit in the Negroes. Of course, I knew they existed. But I thought of the m as accidental to the truth I was getting at. I felt when I came to write that I had to leave them out. Because of the way I have lived, always in other people’s countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head about the same thing. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about myself. I have paid a heavy price for this.”

As I read these lines, I suddenly thought about why Spain lost South America. The Spanish monarchy sent out mostly men, accompanied by very few Spanish women. Many of these men married native women, or black women, or mulattoes. Consequently, the thought arouse back on the Iberian peninsula that these Spaniards who “went native” probably did not have the best interests of the Spanish monarchy at heart. Consequently, they were almost never promoted to positions of authority. The rebels who defeated the Spanish armies were mostly these men, referred to as Creoles, who were not quite Spanish.